Today we launch a campaign to hack European Parliament for real.

As it was explained in our previous communication, Hervé Falciani, (the computer specialist who provided several Courts of Justice from different countries with information about over 130 000 big tax evaders' bank accounts in Switzerland, obtained when he was working for HSBC bank) is the candidate of Citizens' Network Partido X (a citizens' device for media guerrilla that serves the purpose of participating in electoral scenarios, and hacking political systems, in order to achieve a XXI century democracy. The project was launched a year and a half ago by a group of 15M/Indignados activists and has steadily grown quite fast) for the european elections, May 2014.

We think that this candidature is a hack that gives the Spanish and European citizens, and also the International Community, the opportunity to explain how the political class is in collusion with the financial elites and to report it, to fight against this practice and to establish mechanisms to control it. The participation of Falciani in the European Parliament and the work and projects already initiated by Citizens' Network Partido X, will contribute to put an end to the impunity of big tax evaders.

As European citizens we can not miss this opportunity to unmask who are accomplices of the tax evasion fraud of the big fortunes in the European Parliament, the European Institutions and the Spanish Government.

Once in the European parliament, we will develop our work there and implement our projects to pursue Fiscal evasion of the great fortunes using information as a tool. Citizens' Network Partido X and Herve Falciani have already launched this method at the service of all struggles and towards a global change.

This is why we invite all international activists to get involved in the campaign for making this information reach all international civil society.

These are the ways in which you can get involved in the international campaign:

1º Be active on social media (TWITTER y FACEBOOK)
Tuesday April 22
From 11AM Madrid's time (UTC/GMT+1)
Hashtag #FalcianiVsJuncker and using the channel #EP2014

3 - There will be some articles from international media in Spanish, Italian and English that we will share with the hashtag #FalcianiVsJuncker from our accounts in Twitter and Facebook

4 - Forward this to other international activist that may be interested in participating

5 - If you have national or international press contacts you can ask them to contact us during the days following the launch of the campaign if they are interested in reporting about this story at: info@partidox.org

As European parliamentary elections approach in May, a revolutionary citizen network in Spain is emerging to challenge the business as usual approach to electoral politics.

Under the banner of the Partido X: a Citizen Network, a new project conceived around the 15M constellation, the people are putting together a new structure for political participation that seeks to channel the 99%’s thirst for meaningful action, while at the same time undermining the corrosive grip traditional political parties have had in Spain over the last decades.

The idea is simple: create tools and methods for active citizen participation in the drafting of a party platform and the selection of candidates, that if elected must abide by the decisions of the network. “We want to open new ways for some of the victories the citizen movements have achieved to materialize, because the political parties in Spain are totally ignoring the population” says 15M veteran and Partido X organizer Miguel Aguilera.

Partido X combines a variety of emerging practices from around the world—like Brazilian participatory budgeting, wiki-constitutions in Iceland, citizen driven public transparency efforts in Sweden, Denmark or Finland, or regular use of referendums in Switzerland. Partido X is also creating new methods like the “Federation of Competences” an organizing principle that proposes mechanisms to implement effective distributed democratic participation in large-scale organizations. They are radically redrawing our expectations of how a political party ought to look like.

“The Federation of Competences is an attempt to overcome some the limitations of both vertical and horizontal decision making structures. For example, the program of the Partido X is developed through crowd-sourced drafting of public policy proposals, where we invite groups or experts that are already working on a given issue and are socially recognized for it to submit the first draft of a policy proposal and later we post it online for the network to amend. This way we combine expert knowledge about an issue with open and transparent participation.” According to Aguilera so far they have approved three platform proposals using this method, and each go around has proven more successful than the past “our first proposal Democracy, Full Stop took several weeks to pass though the correction and amendments process, since then we’ve passed an Economic Plan and an Emergency Plan to confront the crisis, both have evolved in much smoother fashion.” More than 2,000 people have participated so far in the amend processes, and as the platform grows so do their numbers: around 25,000 are registered in their newsletter, which is the first step to collaborate in the network.

Partido X candidates are also selected differently “we create open lists of candidates, the only requirements are you not be affiliated with an existing political party and not be convicted of corruption or criminal charges. Candidates are then submitted to test-run events where the network can judge their competence.” When pressed on whether the reliance on candidates would jeopardized the democratic structure of the network, Aguilera suggest “we think of Partido X candidates as though they were public avatars for the network. By establishing radical transparency and new methods of participation, candidates will be constantly held responsible, not just until the next election cycle. We already have empty politicians, the difference is they respond to the interest of the corrupt and powerful.” What the Partido X Citizen Network is trying to do isn’t completely new, some established political parties have been experimenting with some of these methods, but it does represent the first incursion into electoral politics on the part of one of the diffuse network movements that sprung up during the global uprisings of 2011: “we took great pains from not trying to profit at the expense of the 15M and other citizen movements, and create to some extent our own identity and network infrastructures. But we are definitely tapping into the spirit of empowerment that 15M created.”

Currently the Partido X is going on tour throughout Spain, spreading the word and gauging whether to run European Parliament candidates for the elections in late May. The tour has become a powerful organizing tool, since it encourages cities that want to host a Partido X event to develop the crowdfunding campaign, promote it through local social networks and take care of the logistics, thus creating autonomous nodes for the Partido X across the country.

“These next european elections promise to be interesting. Even though our approach is different from the 5 Star Movement in Italy, what we are seeing is the growing momentum of a network driven opposition to the big financial interests thats have eroded democracy in Europe. The hope would be that if we start winning elections more parties will begin to adopt this approach.”

Miguel Aguilera is part of a large group of organizers some meeting through 15M and others attracted by the opening of a new front in the electoral arena, either in squares or online, and are spread all across the country. They have been working tirelessly over the past two years to assemble a workable alternative to the domination of the party system “we have been primarily focused on trying to set up a workable, scalable structure, which continues to evolve as the network grows. Soon we will have to focus on how to win elections.”

Many of the tools from different citizen movements will be re-purposed to garner support: everything from live streaming, to creative actions. But what members of the Partido X network are truly banking on is that:

“People are fed up. They are fed up with the political parties, they are fed up economic policies that serve the rich. They're fed up with not having a voice. It’s time for the people to beat the Party System at their own game,” says Partido X.